Gimme Some Sugar

Blog Roll

Thursday, March 28, 2013

Adam Lanza left a home stuffed with weaponry and carried out the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in a 154-bullet barrage that took less than five minutes, investigators said Thursday in the first detailed account of his surroundings and troubled state of mind.

Search warrants from the second-worst school shooting in American history revealed that the home Lanza shared with his mother in Newtown, Conn., was a veritable arsenal: Authorities found at least nine knives, three Samurai swords, two rifles, 1,600 rounds of ammunition and a 7-foot, wood-handled pole with a blade on one side and a spear on the other.

Authorities also recovered a certificate in Lanza’s name from the National Rifle Association, seven of his journals, drawings that he made and books from the house, including books on living with mental illness.

The warrants offered a thorough look at the environment in which Lanza lived before he shot his mother, Nancy, to death and drove to Sandy Hook on the morning of Dec. 14. Twenty first-graders and six teachers and staff were killed before Lanza shot himself to death with the 155th bullet.

The report goes on to say, “At the school, Lanza fired the 154 rounds from a Bushmaster .223-model rifle and the final bullet from a Glock 10mm handgun to take his own life, said Stephen Sedensky, the chief prosecutor investigating the shooting. Police recovered 10 30-round magazines for the Bushmaster that Lanza took to the school. Three of the magazines had a full 30 rounds still in them.”

There are a lot of reasons why someone would want to be able to fire 30 rounds without reloading — all of them are shitty. A person wrote in to my local paper recently, complaining that limiting magazine capacity would inconvenience him at the gun range. Apparently, his convenience is worth allowing people to be able to shoot a bunch of other people in a real big hurry.

Another reason is that unrealistic cowards believe they’ll need a bunch of bullets to fight off roving gangs that are going to attack them any minute now. But if you need 30 rounds, you’re either such a horrible shot that you shouldn’t have a gun in the first place or so hopelessly outnumbered that you’re dead anyway.

The only other reason is Lanza’s: it makes it damned easy to murder a bunch of people quickly. I’d include this in the “we need it to kill tyrants” category, since they’re really arguing for a right to assassinate people. Those people are the worst kinds of Americans, since they seem to want a license to murder so badly that they twist the Second Amendment into one.

As I say, none of the reasons are good — and I’d argue they’re all equally as bad.